In many industries in general and service related industries in particular, it is often necessary to response to request from customers for assistance related to a product that the customer has purchased or will purchase. The respond to large volumes of customer service requests usually necessitates the scheduling of an appointment for a service provider to perform a requested service. A typical system implemented to respond to a service request usually involves receiving the request, logging the request into a service request system, sorting the request based on the type of service requested and assigning the request to service technician. The assignment of a technician will usually require the scheduling of a time to perform the requested service. In this process, providing service schedules for large numbers of service requests and relatively large numbers of service providers is typically difficult to accomplish in a cost effective manner. One reason for the lack of cost effectiveness is the difficultly involved in arranging service appointments that provide high utilization of service provider personnel without incurring inordinate scheduling time delays and/or costs.
In some service industries there are additional difficulties in scheduling in that coordination must be made with each customer to, for example, arrange for access to the customer's premises. Such coordination is particularly prevalent in utility and telecommunication industries. It is typical when such coordination is required, that each customer requesting service is given a service time interval within which the customer's requested service is to be addressed and resolved. Thus, a customer is required to be accessible during the service time interval for a service provider to perform the requested service.
It is also a common practice in industries providing such service time intervals in response to customer service requests that service time intervals are typically larger than the estimated time to perform the requested service. This strategy provides additional flexibility in scheduling service providers in that there is allowance or flexibility for schedule changes without the need for additional contacts with customers and rearrangement of service appointments. However, to provide customer satisfaction, it is also preferred that the service time intervals agree or overlap as much as possible with preferred service request times given by customers. Thus, accomplishing the two goals of effectively scheduling service providers and also accommodating the preferred service times given by customers becomes even more difficult.
Previous attempts to satisfy both the goal of efficient scheduling for service providers and the goal of accommodating customer preferred service times have focused on obtaining all or substantially all customer service requests before formulating a schedule for service providers. Thus, customers with service requests are typically contacted at some later time after the initial customer request and provided with a time, which may or may not correspond with any customer preferred time interval for the service request. This strategy, however, has the disadvantages of: (a) increasing scheduling overhead in that customers must be re-contacted which may involve multiple contact attempts for a single service request; (b) necessitating further inconvenience for customers requesting service; and (c) typically requiring an early cut off date wherein no further customer requests are taken for certain dates not yet having service provider schedules.
In addition to scheduling concerns, some companies receive service request from multiple locations and multiple service request systems such as “Help Desk or CRM”. Many service technicians receive requests from these multiple systems. However, a technician at any time may only check for requests from one system. If this is the case, requests for a technician from other systems could go unattended for extended periods of time. A problem with multiple systems is that many of these systems may have different formats that require different procedures for a technician to retrieve service requests. The technician would need to access the particular ticketing system to determine if there were any service tickets assigned to them from that system.
In the typical procedure for handling a service request, an initial technician would gather the information concerning the problem from the customer. The initial technician would then assign the problem/request to a technician to address for the consumer. The assigning of that task would be in the form of a ticket that the technician. In an example, if a customer were experiencing a problem with a communication network, the initial receiver of the request would create a service ticket for that problem and assign this ticket to a technician. The service ticket would be in the format of the system that created the ticket. Different service tickets can also be created on different systems based on the nature of the problem or service request.
Thus, it would be advantageous to have the capability to merge all service from various service request systems into one central service request site. From that site, the service technicians could retrieve requests from any service request system, which receives requests for that technician.